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THE ELECTRIC BILL ELECTION  
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David Dayen
November 6, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ On Tuesday, the soaring cost of power was a key factor in several
races. Democrats have a plan that can match their economic populist
rhetoric. _

Homemade signs support the candidacy of Democrat Peter Hubbard for
Georgia’s Public Service Commission, July 9, 2025, in Atlanta. ,
Kate Brumback/AP Photo

 

Donald Trump is an unpopular president. He has always been an
unpopular president. Every time America has held an election while he
is in power, his party has lost. That includes off-year elections
(even in 2019, Andy Beshear flipped a gubernatorial seat in red
Kentucky and Democrats took over the Virginia legislature). When he
takes over, he governs badly, people get angry, and they take it out
on his party. It’s really that simple, and I don’t understand why
this isn’t conventional wisdom.

Given that reality, I don’t know that all the effort to lay out what
Democrats must do to win has accomplished much of anything. The iron
law of 21st-century politics, beyond Trump’s incompetence, is that
in nine of the last ten elections, the parties have traded power, with
at least one chamber of Congress or the presidency changing hands.
That’s likely to happen in 2026 as well. The party that actually
responds to public needs will break this cycle, and Donald Trump
resoundingly isn’t up to that task.

_MORE FROM DAVID DAYEN_ [[link removed]]

Will Democrats take this opportunity, or will they be content to
negative polarize their way back to power, without planning what to do
when they get there? The power of Zohran Mamdani’s message came from
finding the right problems to address, which is the necessary step to
finding the right solutions. But if we zoom in a little closer, we can
see a through line that has rapidly become a top-tier issue in U.S.
politics: electric bills.

The Georgia Public Service Commission determines what customers pay
for electricity by regulating utility rates. Georgia is one of only
ten states where utility commissioners are elected. The five
commissioners, all Republicans, approved investor-owned Georgia Power,
the largest utility in the state, for six rate increases
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over the past two years. Georgia Power’s profit margins are now the
second-highest in the nation
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return on equity of 12 percent, far higher than their counterparts.
I’ve written about
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how investor-owned utilities use complex models to bamboozle public
utility commissioners and get the rate hikes they want.

 

Two of the commissioners (Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson) who
made those decisions were up for re-election on Tuesday. Democrats
Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ran on reducing the return on equity
and saving ratepayers $700 million annually. They each won by 26
points
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making them the first Democrats to win a statewide race in Georgia in
two decades.

You might assume that these districts must be skewed to Democrats, but
no: These were statewide races, even though each commissioner
represents a particular part of the state. We only had elections in
2025 because they were canceled for the previous two election cycles
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due to a multiyear legal battle that preserved statewide elections for
the PSC.

So one of the biggest swing states in the country saw total blowouts
on the level of statewide Democratic wins in California. Sure, part of
this is a function of turnout: The preliminary numbers show about 20
percent turnout statewide
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compared to around 50 percent for the last midterm election in
Georgia. Low turnout favors the more motivated party, and Tuesday’s
results show that Democrats were far more motivated. But this is such
a giant victory that it’s reasonable to suggest something else is
going on: People are really, really angry about skyrocketing utility
bills. It’s no surprise that the election where that was the central
issue showed the biggest loss for Republicans.

The dynamic was not limited to Georgia. Democrat Mikie Sherrill defied
the polls and won a double-digit victory to become governor of New
Jersey. In the final weeks of the campaign, she hit on a key promise
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“a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes …
I’m not doing a 10-year study. I’m not writing a strongly worded
letter, I’m not going to convene a group, I’m declaring a state of
emergency to drive your costs down.” Promising something tangible in
the state where utility rates have risen 22 percent in one year
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clearly paid political dividends. (Republican Gov. Brian Kemp happened
to cut a deal
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with Georgia Power recently to freeze base rates for three years, but
when you do that _after_ six rate hikes in two years, and when you
exempt fuel and storm damage costs, it lacks punch.)

The other major governor’s race this week was in Virginia, home to
more data centers than any area on the planet. The build-out of the
computing power needed to generate AI models is seen as responsible
for widening energy demand and therefore soaring costs. Democratic
Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said during the campaign
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that she wanted to see Big Tech companies “pay their own way and
their fair share” of costs for data center energy.

 

Democrat John McAuliff, a former clean-energy staffer in the Biden
administration, flipped a seat
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in Virginia’s House of Delegates that Trump won last year by running
against the data center explosion. In one campaign ad
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his opponent of personally profiting from hundreds of data centers.
“I’m tired of losing family farms to data centers,” McAuliff
says in the ad.

The evidence is pretty strong that electricity has jumped the line
over some other affordability issues and now sits near the top of the
list. And Democrats have a pretty good plan to execute to counteract
this. First, they can stress reducing the profit margins that utility
companies argue they must have in order to stay in business. As much
as anything, this is an anti–Wall Street stance: It’s the
investors demanding double-digit returns. Utility regulators don’t
have to accept that.

In addition, data centers are clearly a fat target from a campaign
standpoint. Forcing a choice between food and electricity so someone
can make a video of a cat in a sombrero dancing isn’t a trade-off
most people will accept.

And then there are the tools that align with environmental
imperatives. Amid high energy demand, no power generation facility
should be arbitrarily disfavored. Clean energy like solar and offshore
wind is vital if the finances are available to build them; Trump’s
war on clean energy is totally counterproductive. The situation offers
that long-sought way for Democrats to sell the energy transition:
It’s actually to reduce costs over the long term.

One of the reasons New Jersey’s utility rates shot up this year was
the closure [[link removed]] of several
power plants; there’s a direct line from Trump denying permits to
offshore wind projects
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that would help New Jersey because he doesn’t like how wind turbines
look from his golf course and how much residents are paying for
electricity. Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican challenger to Sherrill
in New Jersey, aligned with Trump on offshore wind; he got pummeled.

Connecting these power generation projects to the grid, which has
become a flashpoint
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with the grid operator that serves New Jersey and Virginia (PJM),
could be another plank of the agenda, along with reconductoring to
minimize the loss of energy through power lines.

Democratic solutions on energy affordability neatly connect to
Trump’s refusal to allow energy projects to move ahead. And
there’s a populist streak to taking on powerful utility monopolies
and their financial backers. Delivering success here will build trust
in an electorate that has already rejected laissez-faire solutions. It
feels like a real opportunity to reset the climate debate as a
cost-of-living debate, and reverse the structures of power that have
made a basic necessity of life unaffordable.

 

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025.
All rights reserved._

_Read the original article at Prospect.org._
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_Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact
journalism._ [[link removed]]

* electric power
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* cost of living
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* elections
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* Georgia
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* New Jersey
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* Virginia
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* Data Centers
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* wind power
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